Pillars of Eternity Beta Thread

Sure, but there are quite a few locations that can't be explored without killing a lot of enemies that aren't quest related, and they all give XP in a similar way to every other IE game.

I was just pointing that out, as it seemed as if people thought PS: T had a different XP system to other IE games. It doesn't, it's just that there are more quests where you can choose alternative solutions.

The only other difference is that high Wisdom gives you a % XP boost, in addition to being used in a lot of quests, making it by far the most useful and powerful stat. In other IE games, Wisdom is useless for anyone but Clerics/Druids.

Yeah, I couldn't remember how PST played out. I hated that game as it felt like reading a fantasy novel written by a 12 year old. I know most folks here loved it, but I'm an avid fantasy reader and so it was just so bad, especially the gith companion.

It's a speech by a Mormon leader from 1981. Kind of an out of the way piece of writing, but I think it may not be a coincidence — since I know Josh Sawyer did a bunch of research on the Latter Day Saints when he was writing the expansion Honest Hearts for New Vegas.

Whether the content has any thematic bearing on the game I wouldn't venture to guess — it mentions "spiritual death" vs. "temporal death" which could have some weak connection with the game's use of dead souls as fuel for magic — but the same could be said of almost any religious text.

Maybe it's just a phrase Sawyer came across in his reading while they were looking to rename "Project Eternity" that happened to have the a word beginning with the letter P and then "Eternity" in it. Or maybe it's a total coincidence.

-- "But if it's a battle," he said, "which side is which?"
"If it's a battle," said Lilac.

Got burned as combat was reported hard. Maybe the lack of familiarity with the party explains the thought of it being hard.

Beta looks assembled to fulfill a promise rather than deliver informative feed back.

The dwarf's talent does not look as working. While he is supposed to be able to engage several opponents by extending his zone of control, many times, enemies simply passed by to look for enemy behind.

Originally Posted by RedSocialKnight
Maybe it's just a phrase Sawyer came across in his reading while they were looking to rename "Project Eternity" that happened to have the a word beginning with the letter P and then "Eternity" in it. Or maybe it's a total coincidence.

That's a very interesting post, thanks for the thoughts.

I remember making the rather simple assumption when the Kickstarter was announced that "Eternity" was merely an alternate doubling or conceptual replacement for the key word "Infinity", but your post is definitely food for thought when I finally do get to playing.

Also, I'm getting more of an Icewind Dale vibe from what I've seen so far rather than Baldurs Gate - what's the general consensus here? (My backing came $10 short or so of qualifying for the beta)

Some parties are worse, some parties are better.
Finding characters that work good together is major fun for me.
Trying to win with a non optimal (exotic mix) party can be fun too.
(Try JA 2 with with an "eastern block party" -> great fun.)

Making everything equal for casual gamers is boring.

If you suck at party building you should fail after 40h and start over (*)

Originally Posted by HiddenX, post: 3451280, member: 5830
(*) maybe read the manual next time

The manual never tells you if systems are balanced or not.
Balance is incredibly important in an RPG, and also incredibly tough to pull off without much patching judging by efforts of the past. Every developer tries to achieve balance, and so they should. Nearly all fail to get it just right.
The award for balance goes to Dark Souls I believe, though it's systems aren't considerably complex so it was easier to pull off.
I wish Sawyer luck in achieving balance with PoE in addition to making the systems all-round interesting, which certainly is possible.

Reading a manual let you create a balanced party that covers most skills and survives the game with a good chance.
If the game combat/trading system/loot is balanced is another matter. It is important, but it should NOT be solved by making all character classes equal in terms of efficiency. Diversity of parties, specialty of characters is the fun in CRPGs.
PS:
If you powerplay a CRPG, you can exploit every CRPG sooner or later,
because the character efficiency is just a function in many variables (attributes, skills, gear, traits, …) with many local maxima.
If you find too many good local maxima for each character the game could be broken (too easy, becomes boring,…).
This can happen in a second or third play-through if you optimize the characters to the already known gameworld and enemies.
Most of the time I don't do that because it spoils the fun for me (unless there is another difficulty level who needs these adjustments)
But if you try to equilize these efficiency curves for all character classes I think you are better off to play an adventure game with no character building at all.
One major principle (and fun) of CRPGs = adjust your characters' (attributes, skills, gear, traits) and find a fitting mix of characters to survive the challenges and quests the game is throwing at you.

Balancing a CRPG has a lot do of which kind of CRPG we are talking.
I'm not a game developer but a mathematician and software/database engineer, here's my point:

There's no easy magic formula to balance all kind of different CRPGs once and for all.

Why? At least these game elements have a great effect on how to balance a game:

Is there some kind of respawning or not? (matters only if you get XP for kills or you get loot)
Is the game working with linear or nonlinear exploration?
Is the game working with any kind of auto-leveling of enemies or not?
Is the party size variable or not?
Is gear random or hand placed over the gameworld? (again leveled or not)?
How is looting implemented (generated, leveled, hand-placed,…)?
How is trading implemented (generated, leveled, hand-placed,…)?
What kind of attribute/skill/level/XP system is used for character progression?
For what actions do you get XP?
…

Depending on the game design decisions to the above questions you create completety different game engine models.
Each of these models can be completely different mathematically and each one needs it's own balancing and finetuning.

If "balance" means: extreme autoleveling, less stats, skills,… (= less character diversity), equalizing different character classes and their efficiency, artificial money sinks, casual gameplay,… then I hate it.

If "balance" means: challenging game experience over the whole game, no filler combat, hand placed loot, no/or only moderate enemy leveling because of intelligent enemy positioning, non broken trading, different characters lead to a different game experience … then I like it.

Originally Posted by Crooked Bee, post: 3466820, member: 11623
So far pretty much every single party-based CRPG has proved the "you can't solo it" statement wrong. No matter its design philosophy, I don't expect PoE to be different in this regard.
Also, [USER=7705]felipepepe[/USER], PoE may or may not turn out to be a failure, but you can't really call Sawyer more arrogant than your average Codex poster who discusses RPG design. Also also, I think a perfectly balanced CRPG would be an interesting experiment - and I always welcome experimental approaches to RPG design - again, no matter if PoE achieves this goal or not.

[USER=7705]felipepepe[/USER] listen to your secondary consigliere and continue the good fight -> Perfectly balanced CRPGs are a bad pipe-dream. I suspect by trying to reach that goal we'll get a well balanced equalized auto-leveled flattened mix between Dragon Age 2 and Skyrim.
More character-, combat-, spell-, crafting-, equipment-, looting- and trading options, more traits, more class restrictions, more diversity should be the goal of a game designer not less. Create games in which a second play-through feels different if the player creates a different party and/or make different choices!
I remember games where party creation was a fun pre-game in itself and could last several hours; re-create this feeling and I'm happy.

A core principle of CRPGs is to optimize your party by making choices in skills, gear, chosing a profession, chosing factions, build up fame, ranks etc. with the goal to overcome the challenges the game is throwing at you.

This is only interesting and challenging if the game offers good and bad (non optimal) choice options, as well. A game is only a real game if there's a chance that you can fail.

PS:
A real roleplaying gamer has fun to play through bad decisions/situations and doesn't reload every 10 seconds…